When pharmacies fill prescriptions for patients, a pharmacist, technician, or other pharmacy worker typically collects information from the patient—such as, for example, the patient's name, address, date of birth, prescribing physician, and/or insurance information—and stores this information in a pharmacy account in a repository or database. The pharmacy may retain this information for subsequent visits by the patient to the pharmacy to thereby preclude the need to re-enter some or all of it. If the pharmacy has multiple locations, the collected information may be shared between them electronically so that, if the patient goes to a different pharmacy, some or all of the information is still available.
The patient may not be able, however, to later access the collected information without physically travelling to a pharmacy. The patient may wish to edit or update the information, for example, or access other information, such as a status of a recently placed pharmacy order. In order to enable remote access (via, for example, a client computer connected to the Internet), the patient would need to present authentication information (such as a username and password) that is not part of the information collected at the pharmacy. This information might have been collected when the patient placed the pharmacy order, but doing so is inconvenient, deterring, and/or time-consuming for the patient. The patient may even already possess an online account with a store associated with the pharmacy, but without additional authentication, there is no way to link the store account with the pharmacy account with accuracy or certainty. A need therefore exists for a more convenient and simpler way for patients to authenticate to and access pharmacy account information.